The Shoestring Symphony

New York: Simon and Schuster. Very Good+ in Very Good- dj. 1948. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [solid clean copy, bumped at bottom corners but no other significant wear, attractive (if generic) bookplate with previous owner's signature on ffep; jacket shows wear at edges and corners, a few small tears, shallow chipping at spine ends, tiny piece missing at bottom right-hand corner of front panel, considerable fading to spine (where the title is almost unreadable)]. Interesting Hollywood not-quite-novel (although the front panel of the jacket calls it "a novel," I have in the past seen a contemporary disclaimer issued by the publisher, averring that it was in fact "a fictionalized biography, a biographie fantastique." (So in other words, like many Hollywood autobiographies of that era, it has only a glancing relationship to reality.) At any rate, it's an interesting book, a semi-comic work that has relatively little to do with the film biz per se -- however, the protagonist/narrator (named "David Broekman," incidentally) does spend an inordinate amount of time circulating among various Hollywood hangers-on and has-beens, all the while pursuing an increasingly cockeyed and desperate scheme to fulfill his dream of conducting his own symphony at the Hollywood Bowl. The author himself was an (unemployed) Hollywood conductor and composer during the Depression. .